The movie’s title, renamed from the story’s authentic Save the Inexperienced Planet!, speaks to a central fascination of Kubrick spanning from Lolita to Eyes Large Shut. “Bugonia” refers to a mythological course of holding that bees would spawn from the carcass of an ox. This sexual and reproductive anxiousness is baked into the material of Bugonia as one species’ demise turns into one other’s alternative.
Involved about colony collapse dysfunction and its downstream results for pure life, Teddy takes up beekeeping with non secular devotion for the preservation of humanity. Lanthimos, like Kubrick, understands the slippery slope when folks enter into intensive regulation of sexual exercise. Teddy’s monomaniacal asceticism demonstrates the harmful ends to which persons are pushed after they fixate on an act meant to generate life and pleasure.
Whereas the setting of Bugonia is distinctly (and sadly) rooted in America of 2025, its dystopian-inflicted story of radicalized males feels distinctly of a piece with A Clockwork Orange. Regrettably, copycat criminals styled after the protagonist Alex DeLarge have difficult that movie’s legacy. However these off-screen shenanigans don’t dilute Kubrick’s analytical curiosity on-screen to assist perceive how delinquent behaviour develops – in addition to why it’s so exhausting to curb as soon as it has taken root.
Lanthimos and Tracy sort out the thorny nature of Teddy in a similar trend, refusing any straightforward rationalization for his political violence. The character alludes vaguely to the varied ideologies that he cycled by means of on-line earlier than concluding that Earth is underneath assault by Andromedan aliens, an echo chamber mirrored in his secluded rural household dwelling. The crime thriller main as much as Michelle’s abduction provides method to the trimmings of claustrophobic captivity. The warping results of social isolation, as horrifyingly demonstrated in The Shining, hang-out the movie as confinement pushes all of the characters towards new psychological extremities.
Spoilers for Bugonia to comply with.
Bugonia suggestions its hand even additional towards Kubrickian antecedents because the standoff continues. Michelle’s strapped into an digital torture chair meant to reprogram her like Alex’s Ludovico Approach in A Clockwork Orange. Don dies by suicide utilizing a rifle positioned in his mouth simply as Pvt. Pyle does in Full Metallic Jacket. Chapter divisions characteristic a imaginative and prescient of Earth seen from a scientific take away, just like the satellite tv for pc imagery all through 2001: A House Odyssey.
That connection to Kubrick’s cosmic epic turns into even clearer when Michelle reveals that she is an alien, as Teddy theorized. After she returns to her dwelling planet of Andromeda, a council acts on her suggestion that humankind should face speedy termination as a species. Following a telling second of Michelle’s hesitation earlier than dealing the loss of life blow from above, Bugonia returns to the earth for a last montage of tableaus the place all folks have dropped useless instantaneously. Like Kubrick in 2001, Lanthimos can place himself thus far outdoors humanity that he convincingly conjures a world with out it.
The sarcastically soothing sounds of Marlene Dietrich’s “The place Have All of the Flowers Gone?” type a direct allusion to the coda of Dr. Strangelove, which options check footage of nuclear detonations signaling the mutually assured destruction of humanity whereas Vera Lynn croons “We’ll Meet Once more.” It’s a solidification of Lanthimos’ strongest Kubrickian connection inside Bugonia, a mordantly satiric tackle how mankind’s folly will result in its final eradication. The silliness of those movies’ exaggerated eventualities makes their eventual grim evaluations all of the extra devastating to ponder.
The Kubrickian tendency towards fastidiousness implies an absence of sentimentality for the folks it surveys with anthropological intrigue. However persons are usually extra difficult than their personas, as many cinephiles found when Steven Spielberg pushed Kubrick’s long-time ardour undertaking A.I. Synthetic Intelligence over the end line. The movie’s detractors assailed Spielberg for allegedly injecting his saccharine instincts into the movie, assuming that Kubrick would have ended on the useless finish for the humanoid robotic David. However Spielberg clarified that he executed Kubrick’s authentic imaginative and prescient, which was to supply one last glimpse of humanity’s magnificence even after carbon-based life had gone extinct.
Whereas Dr. Strangelove affords no glimpse of any life persevering with following the bomb drops, Lanthimos’ imaginative and prescient of a post-human earth exhibits proof on the contrary. Placing the “useless” in “deadpan,” his parting assertion reveals that animals, in addition to different human-created know-how, proceed to roam the earth ignorantly of human obsolescence. Their manoeuvring round strewn our bodies as Dietrich warbles “when will they ever study?” will not be a cynical epitaph for the species. Bugonia is Yorgos Lanthimos’ completely Kubrickian attraction to acknowledge the humanity in one another earlier than it’s too late.
